Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(25)

“Look at me,” he said, squeezing until the metal bent and buckled. “How does it feel?”

The man couldn’t answer, couldn’t breathe. He scrambled and scratched and gasped as the red light of his soul surfaced again, pouring through August’s hands.

It hit him like ice, a cold so sharp it hurt, and it was the pain that brought August back to himself, to what he was doing, what he had done.

He wrenched backward, but it was too late. The light was gone, and all that was left was the man’s contorted body, eyes burned out and mouth open in a silent scream, red and purple welts rising around the crushed collar.

August felt sick.

His body ached with the pressure—the presence—of the souls, and he wished he could retch them up, expel the weight of so many unwanted lives, but it was no use. The souls were a part of him now, fusing to his bones and surging through his veins.

His chest hitched and he brought his hand to his front where the ax had cut through armored vest and uniform but failed to wound.

“Alpha pair, report.”

He looked down at his hands, coated in Rez’s blood. It was drying on his skin, tacky and cold.

“Alpha pair.”

August had always hated blood. It was the same color as a soul, but empty, useless the moment it left a person’s veins.

“August.”

He forced his mind back.

“I’m here,” he said, startled by the calm in his voice, steady when something deeper wanted to scream. “We were ambushed.” His gaze went to the broken window where the red eyes had watched from the dark. “Rez is dead.”

“Shit.” Phillip, then. Phillip was the only one who swore on the comm. “And the other squad?”

“Dead,” answered August.

What a simple word that was, not messy at all.

“We’ll send a team at dawn, for the bodies.” And then Phillip’s voice was gone, and others were ricocheting across the comm, none of them directed at him. He picked up his bow, his violin—these small, solid pieces of himself—then busied his hands arranging light batons to keep the corpses safe.

Corpse—another simple word that did so little work, failed to describe something that was once a person, and now was simply a shell.

Eventually a familiar voice broke the static in his ear.

“August,” said Emily, “you should return to the Compound.”

Her voice, as steady as his own. He swallowed back the no, no, no and said instead, “I’m waiting. . . . I have to wait.”

And Emily didn’t make him say why, so she must have understood what he meant. Violence begets violence, and monstrous acts make monsters.

The Malchai in the hall came first, rose up like spirits from the bodies of the soldiers. And he cut them down. Then came the Malchai by the smothered candle, rising up beside the word written in blood, and he dispatched that one, too. And then, it came down to Rez.

Her murder had been the work of an instant, but it felt like forever before the shadows finally began to twitch.

His fingers tightened on his bow as the night took a shuddering breath, and then, standing among the corpses, stood the monster.

It looked down at itself in a gesture so human, so natural, and yet so wrong, and then its head came up, red eyes widening right before August drove his steel bow into its heart.





Half a block from the Falstead, August knew he was being followed.

He could hear the shuffle of steps, not on the street behind him but somewhere overhead. He didn’t slow until something floated to the ground at his feet.

It was a patch, three letters—FTF—visible through the blood.

As he straightened, another drifted down.

“Hasn’t anyone told you?” said a voice on the air. “It’s not safe to wander after dark.”

He looked up and saw her standing on a nearby roof, moonlight tracing her pale hair.

“Alice.”

She smiled, flashing knifepoint teeth, and sank into a crouch at the edge of the roof. August told his hands to move, to lift the violin, but it hung there, dead weight at his side. She wasn’t Kate, but every time he saw her, his stomach still dropped. Every time, for just a second.

The Malchai didn’t look like her, not really—all the pieces were wrong—but the whole was more than the sum of its parts. Alice looked like the Kate he’d never met, like the one he’d expected to find at Colton before he met the real girl. The way she’d been described to him—daughter of a monster. All the things Kate wasn’t, all the things she pretended to be, Alice was.

He had known—hadn’t wanted to think about it, but had known all the same—that something would walk out of that house beyond the Waste, and yet it had still been a shock, meeting her. It was two weeks—maybe three—after Kate. After Callum. After Sloan. He was responding to a distress call, but when he got there, all he found were corpses. Corpses, and her, standing the middle of it all, covered in blood, and grinning, the same grin she was wearing now, a grin that was all monster.

“Your trap didn’t work,” he said.

Alice only shrugged. “The next one will. Or the next. I’ve got plenty of time, and you’ve got plenty of people to lose. Such a shame about your friends.” She tossed patches like petals over the edge of the roof, far more than the number of soldiers he’d lost that night. “They’re all so fragile, aren’t they? What do you see in them?”